If you’re considering schooling after high school, either as a teenage freshman or as an adult, do yourself a big favor and do not, under any circumstances, enroll at a for-profit college. If you have friends or family considering college-level learning, warn them as well.

The distinction is significant. For-profit colleges are owned and usually run by private companies with investors or shareholders who expect profit. They are not schools as you may traditionally think of them, they are businesses that sell education and hope for a better life for a profit. Like all for-profit businesses, they exist to make money. If you’re not sure whether a school is for-profit or not, Google it. The school’s Wikipedia page will tell you.

That lurch isn’t just that those students are suddenly academically homeless, it’s that most of them will be left with zero academic value because the “credits” they “earned” at ECA “schools” are worthless.

They’re worthless because most other schools simply don’t recognize any value in them. According to statistics shared by Michael Itzkowitz, Senior Fellow at the think tank, Third Way, an average of 94% of credits accumulated at private, for-profit schools such as those run by ECA are not transferable to public schools such as community colleges. An estimated 83% of those credits disappear even if a student transfers to another for-profit, which no one should ever do.

Which means that the 19,000 plus students who were paying tuition to ECA now not only can’t get any certification from that school, whatever that may be worth, they also likely have to start over at a new school. And since students at private, for-profits largely finance their profit-generating tuition payments with grants and loans, many of these newly homeless students will leave their for-profit ECA schools with debt but nothing else. Debt, by the way, that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has taken great care to make sure students cannot escape.

There is a policy that allows students in schools that close to seek debt relief and it will be interesting to see how the DeVos Education department handles the ECA cases because every dollar of forgiven ECA debt will become a gift from the U.S. Treasury to the private investment firm that owned ECA. Money for which taxpayers will get absolutely zilch.

And the doubly scary part of the ECA closure is it was predictable. Just two years ago, the county’s largest conglomerate of for-profit schools, ITT Tech, closed its doors – similarly stranding students with debt and essentially worthless credits and credentials.

That last statistic – the high loan default rate of those who went to for-profit schools – implies that even those who complete their degree programs at for-profits don’t see much return. That, in turn, implies that the quality of an education at a for-profit, even when seen to completion, is lower than other options.